Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’ on VOD, Where the DC Extended Universe Wraps With a Small Splash

The DC Extended Universe As We Know It dies with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). It’s the 15th movie in a series that began with a rather rank ape-fart of a movie, Man of Steel, and concludes with Jason Momoa, in AatLK’s final scene, making a pretty on-the-nose reference to Iron Man, as if acknowledging that Marvel done whupped DC’s ass. Wisely, the second solo Aquaman adventure is mostly self-contained, existing in the same somewhat-endearingly idiotic world as 2018’s Aquaman, which was borderline-endearing while so much of the other non-Wonder Woman DC movies were stultifying, ugly-to-the-eye slopfests. So does the second Aquaman – which brings back director James Wan, who, instead of dithering around with comic book movies, should be making more movies like Malignant – live up to the firm OK-ness of its predecessor? Almost!

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Aquaman (Momoa), aka Arthur Curry, is a dad! Hooray! So that means he’s extra-tired all the time: He’s not only a hero who saves seamen from evil pirates, he’s also the king of the undersea empire of Atlantis who commutes to work on a glowing giant seahorse from his landbound seaside house, where he lives with wife Mera (Amber Heard) and changes his baby boy’s diapers and tries not to be peed on. He listens to boring Atlantean bureaucrats all day, sometimes gets into a violent scrape with evildoers, then comes home to toys all over the floor. Why don’t they all live in Atlantis in a king’s castle with servants who can get peed on? Not sure. Arthur is of the land and Aquaman is of the sea and home is everywhere, I guess.

Now, please recall the villain from the first movie, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). He’s still around, and still not Over It, It being the death of his pirate father at the hands of Aquaman. His power suit looms in a case of the type that only superheroes and supervillains own: all glass, dramatically lit, holding the costume in far greater reverence than a hanger in the closet could ever provide. Black Manta has a crew of flunkies that includes Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), who feels conflicted: He really wants to see the long-lost worlds under the sea, but in order to do so, is enabling a lunatic to do evil things. What evil things, might you ask? Discovering an ancient trident that possesses him with a green CGI monster who looks like a Lord of the Rings leftover, for starters. And then stealing a bunch of orichalcum from an Atlantean storage facility so he may fuel his evil machines, except that burning the orichalcum means emitting vast amounts of neon-green pollution into the air and rapidly accelerating global warming. See, you sat down to watch a dumbass Aquaman movie, and didn’t realize it was going to be ABOUT something. Fooled ya!

Black Manta’s mucking-about raises the interest of the Atlantean council, who consult with Aquaman in a scene that doesn’t at all deserve to be summarized here, but made me wonder how the characters’ voices create such a majestic echo as if they were in a great stone hall, despite being underwater. I mean, their hair flows and the visuals are murky and bleary, so the laws of physics apply there, but shouldn’t their voices go gurglegurglegurgle? I digress. The Atlanteans battle Black Manta in a sequence in which the face of Nicole Kidman, playing Aquaman’s mother Atlanna, is pasted on a CGI body riding a roboshark, so I guess my nitpicking about underwater talking is stupid, just stupid. 

The fight to quash Black Manta’s evildoing doesn’t go well, and what with one thing and another, Aquaman decides that the only person who can help him now is his half-brother Olm (Patrick Wilson), who you may recall was the antagonist in the first Aquaman. This will require an uneasy sibling reunion, but not until Aquaman busts Olm out of prison. From there, the two of them quest through underground caverns and across deserts, fighting beasts and bad guys on beaches and in trenches. Eventually, Aquaman’s baby, Aquaman Jr., serves his purpose and is kidnapped by Black Manta, and something has to be done about that. I wonder what Aquaman could do. Get in a fight, I suppose. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you ever desired to watch a movie that’s almost wholly comprised of the tonal and visual style of the Jar Jar Binks underwater-world scenes from The Phantom Menace, have I got the movie for you.

Performance Worth Watching: Randall Park is easily the least ridiculous person in this movie.  

Memorable Dialogue: This movie includes drivel like “You tellin’ me you never went topside and had a cheeseburger? Or a slice of ’za? Pepperoni?” (Aquaman) to dippy fish-themed almost-puns like “Got any more krill-brained ideas?” (Olm) to exposition mouthfuls like “This whole place must be heat-shielded to protect it from the surface’s thermal satellites!” (Olm). You choose which you prefer.

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: Aquaman 2 mostly blows, maybe like one of those deadly poisonous fish that blows up, but it at least has three things going for it: It never, ever takes itself seriously. It’s unburdened by greater DCEU baggage, and mostly tells its own compact story. And Wan seems to be having fun directing this thing, which is full of extravagant video-game-style shots that weave in and around and through the action – and, for better or worse, likely wouldn’t be possible (or at least affordable) if the film didn’t consist of roughly 97 percent CGI. 

Of course, the myriad struggles to get the movie made and finally released five years after the first Aquaman means Wan didn’t know until too late that it would be the final punctuation mark on the DCEU, so any hope for a no-holds-barred who-cares let-it-all-hang-out let-’er-rip extravaganza goes unfulfilled. So what everyone settles for is a general regurgitation of the first Aquaman plot, but with a slightly more wide-ranging display of digital “locations” and a larger assemblage of creatures and supporting characters. It all adds up to, well, nothing we haven’t yawned at before, whether it’s DC slop like The Flash or Marvel slop like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, all of these being just-because-you-can-do-anything-with-CGI-doesn’t-mean-you-should-do-it kind of movies. 

Now, I didn’t aggressively dislike Aquaman and the Lost Creativity of a Once-Hopeful Franchise Mired With Deflating Box Office Returns; once you get on its goofy wavelength and acclimate yourself to the comin’-in-HOT Momoaness of the character and performance – is Momoa grating or is he fun? Can’t tell! – it’s a perfectly acceptable popcorn movie, even if it’s too busy by half, and blatantly telegraphs a Mighty Trident Battle between protag and antag. It appeals heavily to your inner nine-year-old who’s uncritical enough to think some of this stuff looks pretty cool, and you might actually convince yourself this is true maybe two or three times during its two-hour runtime. Oh, and that bit above about the movie being ABOUT something? It’s really not. The climate-change thing is as empty as gestures get. The subtext here addresses only the end of this wearisome cinematic universe, which lived up to its potential about 2.6 times out of 15 movies. The DCEU kingdom is hereby abandoned.

Our Call: I dunno. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom almost has its moments. So let’s crunch the comparison sum: It’s a lesser experience than the first Aquaman, which was mediocre-plus. And what do you get with straight-down-the-middle mediocrity? You get me shrugging and saying SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.